Pull quotes on the Web

This @adactio post on Web pull quotes as a print skeuomorphism provoked me to explore the idea a little further. Jeremy Keith writes:

The default assumption is that pull quotes on the web are fine, because everyone else is doing pull quotes on the web. But has anybody ever stopped to ask why? It was this same spiral of unexamined assumptions that led to the web drowning in a sea of splash pages in the early 2000s.

I added a tiny pull quote feature to MuckRock a few months ago. As I was questioning why I should work on this feature at all, here’s the considerations we made.

We spend so much time digesting the articles we’re reading when we write about them in social contexts. Most of the time, the intention of writing on social is promotional. “What’s most exciting about this piece? What is the core tension that drives it forward?” I think that by answering those questions ourselves, we can add to the piece without unnecessarily repeating language or really getting in a reader’s way. We can work more effectively by reusing our writing from social within another context.

Visually, the pullquote format provides a breather with a large block of uniform text, providing contrast and visual interest. In stories without an obvious visual component, this can improve the overall presentation and make a story appear less overwhelming.

At the same time, this can be super obnoxious on mobile because there’s so little space. This also means that there’s less of a wall of text to break up, which means if needed we can do without pull quotes in that context. So, taking a page from progressive enhancement, only showing them in larger contexts with more margin space and breathing room is an acceptable solution to that challenge.

So, in summary: pull quotes are decorative typography and the web is a typographic medium. I think the appearance is less skeuomophic than the words we’re putting into them. There’s certainly valid use cases for the inclusion of pull quotes, however we should take a wider view on what kind of information we want to include. We should also only use them in contexts where they add to the experience of reading a long, text-heavy or text-only piece of writing.